arXiv:2607. 00228v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern time-domain surveys such as the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) generate hundreds of thousands of alerts each night, making real-time decisions for follow-up observations a central challenge in time-domain astronomy.
By Ved G. Shah, Nabeel Rehemtulla, Adam A. Miller, Sushant Sharma Chaudhary, Michael W. Coughlin, Antoine Le Calloch, Matthew J. Graham, Joahan Castaneda Jaimes, Theophile Jegou du Laz, Ashish A. Mahabal, Frank J. Masci, Josiah Purdum, Reed Riddle, Jesper Sollerman, Anastasia Wei, Mansi M. Kasliwal
The study audits the AION-1 foundation model, a 39‑modality transformer trained on over 200 million astronomical objects, and finds that its reliance on a survey detection channel—specifically the segmentation map—introduces a severe systematic bias. By keeping image tokens unchanged and editing only the segmentation map, all model outputs (flux, size, ellipticity, redshift) shift by factors of 110–4400 compared to a placebo, revealing that the model’s predictions are driven more by detection gating than by the actual light distribution. This bias propagates into cosmological analyses, shifting tomographic mean redshifts by a median 0.71 × the LSST DESC requirement and exceeding it in multiple assignments, while removing the detection channel eliminates the effect without measurable cost.
whyItMatters":"The bias in the detection channel directly inflates errors in key astronomical measurements, potentially compromising the precision of cosmological studies that rely on accurate redshift estimates."
By Ihor Kendiukhov
arXiv:2505. 03509v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Anomaly detection in large datasets is essential in astronomy and computer vision.
By Pablo G\'omez, Laslo E. Ruhberg, Maria Teresa Nardone, David O'Ryan
STRADAViT is a self‑supervised continued‑pretraining framework that adapts Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones for radio‑astronomy image analysis. It curates mixed‑survey data, generates radio‑astronomy‑aware training views, and initializes encoders with ViT‑MAE, optionally adding register tokens. Evaluations on three morphology benchmarks (MiraBest, LoTSS DR2, and Radio Galaxy Zoo) show that a register‑based two‑stage checkpoint improves linear‑probe Macro‑F1 scores over the ViT‑MAE baseline and enhances fine‑tuning on MiraBest and RGZ DR1, though performance on LoTSS DR2 fine‑tuning declines; these differences are statistically significant.
By Andrea DeMarco, Ian Fenech Conti, Hayley Camilleri, Ardiana Bushi, Simone Riggi
arXiv:2510. 06200v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Current time series foundation model (TSFM) training corpora largely omit data with certain complexities like irregular temporal sampling.
By Weijian Li, Hong-Yu Chen, Nabeel Rehemtulla, Ved G. Shah, Dongho Kim, Dennis Wu, Qinjie Lin, Adam A. Miller, Han Liu
arXiv:2608.29145v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: The rapid expansion of low Earth orbit satellites such as Starlink is increasingly contaminating astronomical surveys. In practice, contaminated imag...
By Shingeon Kim, Hyeyoon Lee, Dain Kwon, Kanghyun Choi, Sunjong Park, Mi-Ryang Kim, Jeong-Eun Lee, Jinho Lee